Wellington VHF Group Participation in JOTA 2007

Members of the Wellington VHF Group assisted the Paparangi Scout Group at their Jamboree On the Air (JOTA) event held at Paparangi Scout Hall in Wellington on Sunday 21 October. Operating as ZL2WA, Wellington VHF Group members Brian Fearnley ZL2BRF, Mark Foster ZL1VMF, John Andrews ZL2HD and Jim Parnell ZL2APE shows the boys and girls from Paparangi Scouts, Northland Keas and Ngaio Venturer Unit around their hobby and made contact with Scouters from all across New Zealand and the World.

Scouts and Amateur Radio: A great combination!

The first order of business was to erect the High Frequency (HF) Antenna; a task the Scouts were ideally suited to! This was actioned through the creation of two 'Tripods' and two extensions then lashed to the tripods and guyed. A conveniently located light pole was also leveraged to good effect! You can see the progress right and below right.

	Whilst the Scouts were busy setting up the antenna poles, etc, Brian set to work creating a long wire antenna for the HF setup, as we didn't have one with us. This was achieved by joining a number of lengths of what were originally high-end electrical cabling strands together. Left you can see Brian soldering the joints for electical continuity. What we ended up with was an antenna that performed acceptably well on 80m and 40m, as a centre-fed dipole.

Once the antenna was tested for length (with a length of 300Ohm Ribbon connected as feeder to the ATU) an additional long length of pioneering work was attached to the centre tripod to improve the height at the centre. This was tied and guyed into place.
The Finished Article completed, we moved onto other business: Fiddling with radios. After a little backgrounder on some of the basics - callsigns, basic radio procedures and the like, we set about demonstrating some of Amateur Radios finest. Some of the guys (and girls!) got involved in some ARDF - Amateur Radio Direction Finding - where a hidden transmitter is tracked using directional radio antennae and some simple triangulation. Others went hunting across the bands for other JOTA stations to talk to. Eventually we managed to work into Australia on HF, and make contact with Amateur stations in the American continent via the Internet Repeater Linking Project (IRLP) node accessed via the Upper Hutt VHF Repeater. The UHF National System was also handy, allowing contact with other stations across New Zealand, from as far afield as Dunedin. Right you can see Scouts from Paparangi showing their expertise with the ARDF equipment kindly loaned by Fred ZL2AMJ; one of the scouts speaking to fellow JOTA participants in Dunedin via the UHF National System; Bryan ZL2BRF assisting one of the scouts speaking with a VK station on 80 Metres. Wellington VHF Group recognises those who assisted us in setting up the JOTA Event, and thanks to Paparangi Scout Group for being such great participants. Also worth recognising are those stations who took the time to talk to our guys and girls, bot JOTA and Amateur. JOTA remains a great PR event for Amateur Radio and helps to widen the horizons of members of the Scouting Movement worldwide. We're all looking forward to next year!!

Wellington VHF Group, Inc: Online.

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